Meta

As much as I’d love to think of the English essay as being a wonderfully organic affair, which grows naturally and freely from the topic and one’s knowledge of the text, I know this isn’t the case. For most VCE analytical interpretations, you are essentially going to use the same ol’ TEEL structure that […]

The introduction is your first opportunity to hook your reader. It’s where you establish your voice, your style, your view. An introduction that merely sums up the essay in advance will do very little to make any assessor want to read on. You want to engage them from the beginning and suggest to them that […]

Breaking down essay topics is hard. It requires you to follow trails in your mind until you have found a clear sense of direction. Eventually, you will have followed so many paths, and teased out little ideas here and there, that you have a light bulb moment, your mind clears and you know what you will […]

As I’ve been reading Into the Wild, I’ve had a strong sense that McCandless’ journeys through the physical landscapes of North America were a means of searching an inner landscape that he yearned to explore. In this blog piece, Looking for Another Country, Dwight Longenecker writes that: C.S. Lewis names this longing with the German word sehnsucht. He calls […]

Below are some links to articles/pieces/ideas that have something to say about ‘going wild’. The more you read, the more connections you will make as you work through ‘Into the Wild’. The text that I’ve copied way down below is about the desert and what it can symbolise – as soon as I read it, I […]

It might seem strange that my first post of the year is about a cloud storage program thingy…but it is. I have been using Evernote now for 3 years. It revolutionised the way I organised myself and my information. I was able to create detailed lesson plans that remained fluid and flexible – perfect for […]

Each time we discuss illusion and reality we return to the notion that money and success will not automatically lead to happiness. Which is all fine and well…but what, then, does lead to happiness? Be Happy, an article on ‘Less Wrong’, which describes itself as a ‘blog community devoted to refining the art of human rationality’, brings together, […]